Some things are inherently beyond the scope of human experience—unless there’s a really big loophole
As the women tried to pull her away, Ama hammered with her fist on the blank wall of the Building. “Let me inside! Oh, let me inside!”
But the Building had sealed itself against her. If the Weapon decreed that you were to have your child in the open air, that was how it was going to be, and no mere human being could do anything about it.
And she could not fight the logic of her body. The contractions came in pulses now, in waves that washed through the core of her being. In the end it was her father, Telni, who put his bony arm around her shoulders, murmuring small endearments. Exhausted, she allowed herself to be led away.
Telni’s sister Jurg and the other women had set up a pallet for her not far from the rim of the Platform. They laid her down here and fussed with their blankets and buckets of warmed water, and prepared ancient knives for the cutting. Her aunt massaged her swollen belly with oils brought up from the Lowland. Telni propped her head on his arm, and held her hand tightly, but she could feel the weariness in his grip.
So it began. She breathed and screamed and pushed. And through it all, here at the lip of the Platform, she was surrounded by her world, the Buildings clustered around her, the red mist of the Lowland far below, above her the gaunt cliff on which glittered the blue-tinged lights of the Shelf cities, and the sky over her head where chains of stars curled like windblown hair. On Old Earth time was layered, and when she looked up she was peering up into accelerated time, at places where human hearts fluttered like songbirds’. But there was a personal dimension to time too, so her father had always taught her, and these hours of her labor were the longest of her life, as if her body had been dragged down into the glutinous, redshifted slowness of the Lowland.
When it was done, Jurg handed her the baby. It was a boy, a scrap of flesh born a little early, his weight negligible inside the spindling-skin blankets. She immediately loved him unconditionally, whatever alien thing lay within. “I call him Telni like his grandfather,” she managed to whisper.
Telni, exhausted himself, wiped tears from his crumpled cheeks.
She slept for a while, out in the open.
When she opened her eyes, the Weapon was floating above her.
It was a sphere as wide as a human was tall, reflective as a mirror, hovering at waist height above the smooth surface of the Platform. She could see herself in the thing’s heavy silver belly, on her back on the heap of blankets, her baby asleep in the cot beside her. A small hatch was open in its flank, an opening with lobed lips, like a mouth. From this hatch a silvery tongue, meters long, reached out and snaked to the back of the neck of the small boy who stood beside the sphere.
Her aunt, her father, the others hung back, nervous of this massive presence that dominated all their lives.
The boy attached to the tongue-umbilical took a step towards the cot.
Telni blocked his way. “Stay back, Powpy, you little monster. You were once a boy as I was. Now I am old and you are young. Stay away from my grandson.”
Powpy halted. Ama saw that his eyes flickered nervously, glancing at Telni, the cot, the Weapon. This showed the extent of the Weapon’s control of its human creature; somewhere in there was a frightened child.
Ama struggled to sit up. “What do you want?”
The boy Powpy turned to her. “We wish to know why you wanted to give birth within a Building.”
“You know why,” she snapped back. “No child born inside a Building has ever harbored an Effigy.”
The child’s voice was flat, neutral—his accent like her father’s, she thought, a little boy with the intonation of an older generation. “A child without an Effigy is less than a child with an Effigy. Human custom concurs with that, even without understanding—“
“I didn’t want you to be interested in him.” The words came in a rush. “You control us. You keep us here floating in the sky. All for the Effigies we harbor, or not. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?” Telni laid a trembling hand on her arm, but she shook it away. “My husband believed his life was pointless, that his only purpose was to grow old and die for you. In the end he destroyed himself— ”
“Addled by the drink,” murmured Telni.
“He didn’t want you to benefit from his death. He never even saw this baby, his son. He wanted more than this!”
The Weapon seemed to consider this. “We intend no harm. On the contrary, a proper study of the symbiotic relationship between humans and Effigies—”
“Go away,” she said. She found she was choking back tears. “Go away!” And she flung a blanket at its impassive hide, for that was all she had to throw.
The Weapon came to see Telni a few days after the funeral of his mother and grandfather. He was ten years old.
Telni had had to endure a vigil beside the bodies, where they had been laid out close to the rim of the Platform. He slept a lot, huddled against his kind but severe aunt Jurg, his last surviving relative.
At the dawn of the third day, as the light-storms down on the Lowland glimmered and shifted and filled the air with their pearly glow, Jurg prodded him awake. And, he saw, his mother was ascending. A cloud of pale mist burst soundlessly from the body on its pallet. It hovered, tendrils and billows pulsing—and then, just for a heartbeat, it gathered itself into a form that was recognizably human, a misty shell with arms and legs, torso and head.
Jurg, Ama’s sister, was crying. “She’s smiling. Can you see? Oh, how wonderful . . .”
The sketch of Ama lengthened, her neck stretching like a spindling’s, becoming impossibly long. Then the distorted Effigy shot up into the blueshifted sky and arced down over the lip of the Platform, hurling itself into the flickering crimson of the plain below. Jurg told Telni that Ama’s Effigy was seeking its final lodging deep in the slow-beating heart of Old Earth, where, so it was believed, something of Ama would survive even the Formidable Caresses. But Telni knew that Ama had despised the Effigies, even the one that turned out to have resided in her.
They waited another day, but no Effigy emerged from old Telni. So the bodies were taken across the Platform, to the center of the cluster of box-shaped, blank-walled Buildings, and placed reverently inside one of the smaller structures. A week later, when Jurg took Telni to see, the bodies were entirely vanished, their substance subsumed by the Building, which might have become a fraction larger after its ingestion.
So Telni, orphaned, was left in the care of his aunt.
She tried to get him to return to his schooling. A thousand people lived on the Platform, of which a few hundred were children; the schools were efficient and well organized. But Telni, driven by feelings too complicated to face, was restless. He roamed, alone, through the forest of Buildings. Or he would stand at the edge of the Platform, before the gulf that surrounded the floating city, and watch the Shelf war unfold, accelerated by its altitude, the pale blue explosions and whizzing aircraft making an endless spectacle. He was aware that his aunt and teachers and the other adults were watching him, concerned, but for now they gave him his head.
On the third day he made for one of his favorite places, which was the big wheel at the very center of the Platform, turned endlessly by harnessed spindlings. Here you could look down through a hatch in the Platform, a hole in the floor of the world, and follow the tethers that attached the Platform like a huge kite to the Lowland ground half a kilometer below, and watch the bucket chains rising and falling. The Loading Hub was directly beneath the Platform, the convergence of a dozen roads crowded day and night. Standing here it was as if you could see the machinery of the world working. He liked to think about such things, as a distraction from thinking about other things. And it pleased him in other ways he didn’t really understand, as if he had a deep, sunken memory of much bigger, more complicated machinery than this.
Best of all you could visit the spindling pens and help the cargo jockeys muck out a tall beast, and brush the fur on its six powerful legs, and feed it the strange purple-colored straw it preferred. The spindlings saw him cry a few times, but nobody else, not even his aunt.
When the Weapon came to see him he was alone in one of the smaller Buildings, near the center of the cluster on the Platform. He was watching the slow crawl of lightmoss across the wall, the glow it cast subtly shifting. It was as if the Weapon just appeared at the door. Its little boy stood at its side, Powpy, with the cable dangling from the back of his neck.
Telni stared at the boy. “He used to be bigger than me. The boy. Now he’s smaller.”
“We believe you understand why,” said Powpy.
“The last time I saw you was four years ago. I was six. I’ve grown since then. But you live down on the Lowland, mostly. Did you come up in one of the freight buckets?”
“No.”
“You live slower down there.”
“Do you know how much slower?”
“No.”
The boy nodded stiffly, as if somebody was pushing the back of his head. “A straightforward, honest answer. The Lowland here is deep, about half a kilometer below the Platform, which is itself over three hundred meters below the Shelf. Locally the stratification of time has a gradient of, approximately, five parts in one hundred per meter. So a year on the Platform is—”
“Only a couple of weeks on the Lowland. But, umm, three hundred times five, a year here is fifteen years on the Shelf.”
“Actually closer to seventeen. Do you know why time is stratified?”
“I don’t know that word.”
Powpy’s little mouth had stumbled on it too, and other hard words. “Layered.”
“No.”
“Good. Nor do we. Do you know why your mother died?”
That blunt question made him gasp. Since Ama had gone, nobody had even mentioned her name. “It was the refugees’ plague. She died of that. And my grandfather died soon after. My aunt Jurg says it was of a broken heart.”
“Why did the plague come here?”
“The refugees brought it. Refugees from the war on the Shelf. The war’s gone on for years, Shelf years. My grandfather says—said—it is as if they are trying to bring down a Formidable Caress of their own. The refugees came in a balloon. Families with kids. Grandfather says it happens every so often. They don’t know what the Platform is, but they see it hanging in the air, below them, at peace. So they try to escape.”
“Were they sick when they arrived?”
“No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren’t im—”
“Immune.”
“Immune like the refugees.”
“Why not?”
“Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along.”
“Your understanding is clear.”
“My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives.”
“‘Meddle.’ We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We ‘meddled’ long before you were born.”
“Why?”
Silence again. “That’s too big a question. Ask smaller questions.”
“Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“Time goes twenty-five times slower down there. It’s as if you’re trying to feed a city twenty-five times the size.”
“That’s right. Now ask about something you don’t know.”
He pointed to the lightmoss. “Is this the same stuff as makes the light-storms, down on the Lowland?”
“Yes, it is. That’s a good observation. To connect two such apparently disparate phenomena—”
“I tried to eat the lightmoss. I threw it up. You can’t eat the spindlings’ straw either. Why?”
“Because they come from other places. Other worlds than this. Whole other systems of life.”
Telni understood some of this. “People brought them here, and mixed everything up.” A thought struck him. “Can spindlings eat lightmoss?”
“Why is that relevant?”
“Because if they can, it must mean they came from the same other place.”
“You can find that out for yourself.”
He itched to go try the experiment, right now. “Did people make you?”
“They made our grandfathers, if you like.”
“Were you really weapons?”
“Not all of us. Such labels are irrelevant now. When human civilizations fell, sentient machines were left to roam, to interact. There was selection, of a brutal sort, as we competed for resources and spare parts. We enjoyed our own long evolution. A man called Bayle mounted an expedition to the Lowland, and found us.”
“You were farming humans. That’s what my mother said.”
“It wasn’t as simple as that. The interaction with Bayle’s scholars led to a new generation with enhanced faculties.”
“What kind of faculties?”
“Curiosity.”
Telni considered that. “What’s special about me? That I might have an Effigy inside me?”
“Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That’s very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. There may be questions you can answer that we can’t. There may be questions you can ask that we can’t.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
He thought. “What are the Formidable Caresses?”
“The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilization. In the past, and in the future.”
“How does time work?”
“That’s another question you can answer yourself.”
He was mystified. “How?”
A seam opened up on the Weapon’s sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon’s control, Telni could see his revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex. He handed it to Telni.
Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. “What is it?”
“A clock. A precise one. You’ll work out what to do with it.” The Weapon moved, gliding up another meter into the air. “One more question.”
“Why do I feel . . . sometimes . . .” It was hard to put into words. “Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they’re young. But . . . Is it a stupid question?”
“No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again.” It drifted away, two meters up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned. “What will you do now?”
Telni grinned. “Go feed moss to a spindling.”
At twenty-five, Telni was the youngest of the Platform party selected to meet the Natural Philosophers from the Shelf, and MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.
The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of the tethered airship. The Shelf folk looked as if they longed to be away from the edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below. Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform’s sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange with the Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.
And Telni found himself partnered with MinaAndry.
There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the looks of the older men, Telni thought. But Mina was beautiful. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant—not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics behind it, MinaAndry was the most beautiful girl Telni had ever seen, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.
They walked across the Platform, through the city of living Buildings. It was a jumble of cubes and rhomboids, pyramids and tetrahedrons—even one handsome dodecahedron. The walls were gleaming white surfaces, smooth to the touch, neither hot nor cold, and pierced by sharp-edged doorways and windows.
“This place is so strange.” Mina ran her hand across the smooth surface of a Building. Within its bland surface, through an open door, could be glimpsed the signs of humanity, a bunk bed made of wood hauled up from the plain, a hearth, a cooking pot, cupboards and heaps of blankets and clothes, and outside a bucket to catch the rain. “We build things of stone, of concrete, or wood. But this—”
“We didn’t build these structures at all. The Buildings grew here. They bud from units we call Flowers, and soak up the light from the storms. Like the Weapons, the Buildings are technology gone wild, made things modified by time.”
“It all feels new, although I suppose it’s actually very old. Whereas Foro feels old. All that lichen-encrusted stone! It’s like a vast tomb . . .”
But Telni knew that the town she called Foro was built on the ruins of a city itself called New Foro, devastated during the war he remembered watching as a boy. He had naively expected the Shelf folk to be full of stories of that war when they came here. But the war was fifteen Platform years over, more than two hundred and fifty Shelf years, and what was a childhood memory to Telni was long-dead history to Mina.
“Is it true you feed your dead to the Buildings?” She asked this with a kind of frisson of horror.
“We wouldn’t put it like that . . . They do need organic material. In the wild, you know, down on the Lowland, they preyed on humans. We do let them take our corpses. Why not?” He stroked a wall himself. “It means the Buildings are made of us, our ancestors. Sometimes people have to die inside a Building. The Weapon decrees it.”
“Why?”
“It seems to be studying Effigies. It thinks that the construction material of which Buildings are made excludes Effigies. Some of us are born inside Buildings, so no Effigy can enter us then. Others die within a Building, a special one we call the Morgue, in an attempt to trap the Effigies when they are driven out of their bodies. My own aunt died recently, and had to be taken inside the Morgue, but no Effigy was released.”
“It seems very strange to us,” Mina said cautiously. “To Shelf folk, I mean. That here you are living out your lives on a machine, made by another machine.”
“It’s not as if we have a choice,” Telni said, feeling defensive. “We aren’t allowed to leave.”
She looked down at her feet, which were clad in sensible leather shoes—not spindling, like Telni’s. “I think you can tell that a machine built this place. It lacks a certain humanity.” She glanced at him uncertainly. “Look, I’m speaking as a Philosopher. I myself am studying geology. The way time stratification affects erosion, with higher levels wearing away faster than the low, and the sluggish way rivers flow as they head down into the red . . .” She wasn’t concentrating on what she was saying, but inspecting her surroundings. “For instance there’s the thinness of this floor. On the Shelf we all grew up on a cliff-top. But here we are suspended in the air on a paper-thin sheet! Logically, perhaps, we’re even safer here than standing on the Shelf. But it doesn’t feel safe. A human designer would never have done it like this.”
“We live as best we can.”
“I’m sure.”
He took her to the very center of the Platform, and the wheel that turned as always, drawn by teams of patient spindlings. The cargo jockeys, unloading buckets and pallets of supplies drawn up from the Lowland, stared with curiosity as MinaAndry patted the necks of the laboring beasts. “How charming these beasts are! You know that on the Shelf they were driven to extinction during the War of the Cities. We are slowly restocking with animals drawn up from the Lowland herds, but it’s ferociously expensive . . .”
Something about the way she patted and stroked the tall, elegant creatures moved Telni, deep inside. But he had to pull her aside when he saw a spindling was ready to cough; spindlings lacked anuses and vomited their shit from their mouths. Mina was astonished at the sight.
Anyhow, he hadn’t brought her here for spindlings. He took Mina’s hand and led her to the center of the Hub, close to the great hatch in the floor of the Platform, which revealed the cables that dangled down to the Lowland far below.
Mina squealed and drew back. “Oh! I’m sorry. Vertigo—what a foolish reaction that is!”
“But evidently a very ancient one. Look.” He pointed down through the hole. “I brought you here to see my own work. I earn my living through my studies with an apothecary. But this is my passion . . .”
Holding tight to the rail, pushing a stray strand of hair back from her face, she peered down through the floor. From here, Telni’s cradles of pendulums, of bobs and weights and simple control mechanisms, were clearly visible, attached in a train along one of the guide ropes that tethered the Platform to the Lowland plain.
“Pendulums?”
“Pendulums. I time their swing. From here I can vary the length and amplitude . . .” He showed her a rigging-up of levers he had fixed above the tether’s anchor. “Sometimes there’s a snag, and I go down in a harness, or send one of the cargo jockeys.”
“How do you time them?”
“I have a clock the Weapon gave me. I don’t understand how it works,” he said, and that admission embarrassed him. “But it’s clearly more accurate than any clock we have. I have the pendulums spread out over more than a quarter of a kilometer. There’s no record of anybody attempting to make such measurements over such a height difference. And by seeing how the period of the pendulums vary with height, what I’m trying to measure is—”
“The stratification of time. The higher up you raise your pendulums, the faster they will swing.” She smiled. “Even a geologist understands that much. Isn’t it about five percent per meter?”
“Yes. But that’s only a linear approximation. With more accurate measurements, I’ve detected an underlying curved function . . .” The rate at which time flowed faster, Telni believed, was inversely proportional to the distance from the center of Old Earth. “It only looks linear, simply proportional to height, if you pick points close enough together that you can’t detect the curve. And an inverse relationship makes sense, because that’s the same mathematical form as the planet’s gravitational potential, and time stratification is surely some kind of gravitational effect . . .” He hoped this didn’t sound naïve. His physics, based on the philosophies extracted from Foro centuries ago with the Platform’s first inhabitants, was no doubt primitive compared to the teachings Mina had been exposed to.
Mina peered up at a sky where an unending storm of star clouds passed, brightly blueshifted. “I think I understand,” she said. “My mathematics is rustier than it should be. That means that the time distortion doesn’t keep rising on and on. It comes to some limit.”
“Yes! And that asymptotic limit is a distortion factor of around three hundred and twenty thousand—compared to the Shelf level, which we’ve always taken as our benchmark. Actually, it corresponds to the five percent rule applied across the radius of Old Earth. So one year here corresponds to nearly a third of a million years, up there in the sky.”
“Or,” she said, “one year out there—”
“Passes in about a hundred seconds on the Self. We are falling into the future, Mina! Some believe that once Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging among the stars. And its people were more or less like us. But Earth came under some kind of threat. And so the elders of Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future: Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children.”
“That’s all speculation.”
“Yes. But it would explain such a high rate. And, Mina, I think this rate should be observable. The interval we call a ‘year’ is just a counting-up of days, but it’s thought to be a folk memory of what was a real year, the time it took Old Earth to circle its sun. We can’t distinguish that sun, whatever is left of it. But we ought to be able to see the stars shifting back and forth, every hundred seconds, as we turn around the sun. I’m trying to encourage the astronomers to look for this, but they say they’re too busy mapping other changes.” He waved a hand at the sky. “Those chains of stars—”
“They evolve faster than seen from Foro,” she breathed, her upturned face bathed in the shifting blue starlight.
“They are not as previous generations witnessed them. Something new in the sky. However if the astronomers could be persuaded to measure the external year, it would confirm my mathematics . . . I’m always trying to improve my accuracy. The pendulums need to be long enough to give a decent period, but not too long or else the time stratification becomes significant even over the length of the pendulum itself, and the physics gets very complicated—”
She slipped her hand into his. “It’s a wonderful discovery. Nobody before, maybe not since the last Caress, has worked out how fast we’re all plummeting into the future.”
He flushed, pleased. But something made him confess, “I needed the Weapon’s clock to measure the effects. And it set me asking questions about time in the first place.”
“It doesn’t matter what the Weapon did. This is your work. You should be happy.”
“I don’t feel happy,” he blurted.
She frowned. “Why do you say that?”
Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he’d never spoken to anybody else. “Because I don’t always feel as if I fit. As if I’m not like other people.” He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. “Maybe that’s why I’m turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can’t. Do you ever feel like that?”
Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling’s stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. “Sometimes,” she said. “Maybe everybody does. And maybe it’s a reaction to the unnatural environment of the Platform. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. Do you get many birds up here?”
“Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest.”
“I used to watch birds as a kid. I’d climb up to a place we call the Attic . . . The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They’ve worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don’t get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks.”
“I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance.” He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. “Not on this island in the sky, a creature of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up.”
She took both his hands and smiled at him. “I have a feeling you’re going to be a challenge. But I like challenges.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Or I wouldn’t be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while seventeen months pass at home. Think of the parties I’m missing!”
His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. “I’ve only known you hours,” he said. “Yet I feel—”
“You should return to your work.” The familiar child’s voice was strange, cold, jarring.
Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some meters away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of the world.
Telni’s anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. “What do you want?”
“We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address which we—”
“Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone.” Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. “Leave me alone, I say!”
Powpy turned to look at Mina. “She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters. That is her destiny. Not here.”
“I will stay if I wish,” Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.
Telni found himself snarling, “Maybe she’ll bear my sons and daughters.”
“No,” said the boy.
“What do you mean, no?”
“She is not suitable for you.”
“She’s a scholar from Foro! She’s from the stock you brought here in the first place.”
‘It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy, as few in her family do. Your partner should have an Effigy. That is why—’
“Selective breeding,” Mina gasped. “It’s true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle . . .”
“I don’t care about Effigies,” Telni yelled. “I don’t care about you and your stupid projects.” He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.
“Telni, don’t,” Mina called.
The boy said calmly, “Already you have done good and insightful work, which—”
Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy’s head. Powpy went down squealing.
Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. “What have you done?”
“He—it—all my life—”
“Is that this boy’s fault? Oh, get away, you fool.” She knelt down and cradled the child’s head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. “He’s going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw—no, child, don’t try to talk.” She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. “Don’t make him speak for you again. He’s hurt.”
Telni opened his hands. “Mina, please—”
“Are you still here?” she snarled. “Go get help. Or if you can’t do that, just go away. Go!”
He knew he had lost her, in this one moment, this one foolish blow.
He turned away and headed towards the Platform’s hospital to find a nurse.
Copyright © 2009 Stephen Baxter
